The following comments were first posted on this blog in March, 2006. I am reposting them today in response to an email from a kind fellow who saw my name in the paper and wondered if I had ever “done anything” in this area.

Reactions to Searching for a Signal
Originally published March, 2006

I would love to be the first person to conclusively identify the signal of increasing greenhouse gases in the historical record of disaster losses. I have no doubt that such a study, scientifically solid and peer reviewed, would be widely cited, globally reported, and the author(s) would reach near rock star status in the climate science and advocacy communities. The problem is that I (and a number of colleagues) have been looking for such a signal for more than 10 years, recording our efforts in dozens of papers along the way, and so far the signal hasn’t been found.

On Wednesday this week [March, 2006. The paper that resulted from that talk can be seen here in PDF.] I’ll be giving the NRC Ocean Studies Board’s annual Roger Revelle memorial lecture at the Smithsonian in Washington DC in which I’ll provide an overview of this search and what we’ve found to date. The message of the talk is as follows:


1. Anthropogenic climate change is real.
2. Greenhouse gas reductions make good policy sense.
3. But there is no evidence that energy policies focused on climate change can be an effective tool of disaster mitigation.
4. There is currently no evidence that allows us to attribute to human-caused climate change any part of the decades-long trend of a rising toll of disasters, a record which is dominated by floods and storms.
5. More people are beginning to conduct research in this area and perhaps future research results will tell a different story, but 1-4 above are what can be said today and supported by scientific research.
6. Given the state of the literature, this should not be a controversial conclusion.
7. There are better justifications for GHG reductions than disasters, and there are far better options available to policy makers than energy policies to make a material difference in future impacts of climate and weather extremes.

Of late, as the subject of disasters and climate change has become increasingly salient I have noticed a significant ratcheting up in the intensity of criticism that some leading scientists bring to discussing my work. Some of it, quite frankly, borders on the bizarre. Consider the following recent experiences:

*On several occasions, one in a public forum, a very prominent scientist whose name you would all recognize all but accused me of falsifying my research results in order to hide the global warming signal in disaster losses that he believes must certainly be there. The alternative, that our work is solid, apparently is not a possibility.

*Another prominent scientist whose name you would all recognize quite angrily and nastily accused me in an email of being a climate change denier who refuses to see the truth. I replied with an explanation that I was no denier and I provided a list of a few dozen peer-reviewed papers to support my perspective on climate change and disasters, with no response.

*After giving a lecture at a major U.S. university I had a chance to talk one-on-one with the head of the unit that had invited me (a major unit on campus), who was another big-name-you-would-recognize. His first question for me was to ask my political orientation, stating that it was hard to discern from my talk. I thought it an odd question but I answered him anyway. He had no substantive questions about my talk, so I hope my answer to his political orientation question clarified everything.

*Perhaps most troubling, the editor of a leading scientific journal asked me to “dampen” the message of a peer-reviewed publication for fear that it would be “seized upon” by those seeking to defend their interests in business-as-usual energy policies. I found this incredible – was I really being asked to change scientifically well-supported arguments based on some editorial concerns about politics?!

These sorts of experiences are not completely new for me. In past years I have also described how colleagues have pressured me to be careful about my research because of its supposed political implications for those seeking to justify energy policy action based on reducing disaster impacts. Of course, from where I sit one important message of my research is for advocates of changes in energy policies related to climate change simply to make better arguments and to avoid bad ones. This message would seem to be in everyone’s interests.

Some of the experiences described above can be explained as resulting from interactions with a few hyper-politically-charged scientists, some who are full of anger and vitriol. So perhaps these experiences are only a function of a few bad apples that I have the good fortune to be interacting with. From that perspective perhaps I should not be too concerned by the behavior of these individuals. But given their prominence in the community and its institutions, and the chance that these are not isolated experiences, I do worry that the politicization of climate science is reaching epidemic proportions with profound consequences for the field. From my narrow perspective on the climate science community, viewed through the lens of how my work on disasters is received, it seems that some research is judged not by its content but by how some would like the research to turn out. For my part I will continue searching for a signal of global warming in the disaster record, and if and when I find it you’ll know that I really believe that it is there. And know that I won’t be intimidated, bullied, or pressured into saying otherwise or staying silent.

For those who are interested in my work in this area, the following list of publications focuses primarily on storms and floods and document various ways that we have tried to understand and probe the disaster loss record in these contexts. Of course, there is much research conducted by others on this subject, most of which is referenced in the articles below. We have discussed this subject at length here at Prometheus and new readers can find this discussion under the climate change archives. As in any area of science there is much work in this area remaining to be done, and such research may indeed provide new insights that change the perspectives of today.

PDFs of the articles below, almost all which are peer reviewed, can be found here, and the books should be obtainable from your library. [Papers published since 2005 can be found at the link above.]

Downton, M., J. Z. B. Miller and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2005. Reanalysis of U.S. National Weather Service Flood Loss Database, Natural Hazards Review, 6:13-22.

Downton, M. and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2005. How Accurate are Disaster Loss Data? The Case of U.S. Flood Damage, Natural Hazards, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 211-228.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2005. Are there trends in hurricane destruction? Nature, Vol. 438, December, pp. E11.

Pielke, R. A., 2005. Attribution of Disaster Losses, Science, Vol. 310, December 9, pp. 1615.

Pielke, Jr., R.A., S. Agrawala, L. Bouwer, I. Burton, S. Changnon, M. Glantz, W. Hooke, R. Klein, K. Kunkel, D. Mileti, D. Sarewitz, E. Thompkins, N. Stehr, and H. von Storch, 2005.Clarifying the Attribution of Recent Disaster Losses: A Response to Epstein and McCarthy, Bulletin of American Meteorological Society, Volume 86 (10), pp. 1481-1483.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., C. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver and R. Pasch, 2005. Hurricanes and global warming, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 86:1571-1575.

Pielke, Jr., R.A. and D. Sarewitz, 2005. Bringing Society back into the Climate Debate, Population and Environment, Volume 26, Number 3, pp. 255-268.

Pielke, Jr., R.A., J. Rubiera, C. Landsea, M. Fernandez, and R.A. Klein, 2003: Hurricane Vulnerability in Latin America and the Caribbean, Natural Hazards Review, 4: 101-114.

Downton, M. and R.A. Pielke, Jr., 2001. Discretion Without Accountability: Politics, Flood Damage, and Climate, Natural Hazards Review, 2(4):157-166.

Downton, M. and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2001: Politics and disaster declarations. Natural Hazards Observer, 25(4), 1-3.

Changnon, S., R. A. Pielke, Jr., D. Changnon, D., R. T. Sylves, and R. Pulwarty, 2000. Human Factors Explain the Increased Losses from Weather and Climate Extremes, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 81(3), 437-442.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2000. Flood Impacts on Society: Damaging Floods as a Framework for Assessment. Chapter 21 in D. Parker (ed.), Floods. Routledge Press: London, 133-155.

Pielke, Jr., R. A. and M.W. Downton, 2000. Precipitation and Damaging Floods: Trends in the United States, 1932-97. Journal of Climate, 13(20),
3625-3637.

Pielke, Jr., R.A., M. Downton, J. Z. B. Miller, S. A. Changnon, K. E. Kunkel, and K. Andsager, 2000: Understanding Damaging Floods in Iowa: Climate and Societal Interactions in the Skunk and Raccoon River Basins, Environmental and Societal Impacts Group, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, August.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., R.A. Klein and D. Sarewitz, 2000. Turning the Big Knob: Energy Policy as a Means to Reduce Weather Impacts. Energy and Environment, Vol. 11, No. 3, 255-276.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., and R. A. Pielke, Sr. (eds.), 2000: Storms: a volume in the nine-volume series of Natural Hazards & Disasters Major Works published by Routledge Press as a contribution to the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. Routledge Press: London.

Kunkel, K., R. A. Pielke Jr., S. A. Changnon, 1999: Temporal Fluctuations in Weather and Climate Extremes That Cause Economic and Human Health Impacts: A Review. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 80, 6, 1077-1098.

Landsea, C. L., R. A. Pielke, Jr., A. Mestas-Nuez and J. Knaff, 1999. Atlantic Basin Hurricanes: Indicies of Climate Changes. Climate Change, 42, 89-129.

Pielke Jr., R.A., 1999: Nine fallacies of floods. Climatic Change, 42, 413-438.

Pielke, Jr., R. A. and M. Downton, 1999. U.S. Trends in Streamflow and Precipitation: Using Societal Impact Data to Address an Apparent Paradox. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 80(7), 1435-1436.

Pielke, Jr., R.A., and C.W. Landsea, 1999: La Nina, El Nino, and Atlantic Hurricane Damages in the United States. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 80, 10, 2027-2033.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., C. W. Landsea, M. Downton, and R. Muslin, 1999: Evaluation of Catastrophe Models Using a Normalized Historical Record: Why It Is needed and How To Do It. Journal of Insurance Regulation. 18, pp. 177-194.

Pielke, Jr., R. A. and C. W. Landsea, 1998. Normalized Hurricane Damages in the United States: 1925-95. Weather and Forecasting, American Meteorological Society, Vol. 13, 621-631.

Pielke Jr., R. A., 1997: Reframing the U.S. Hurricane Problem. Society and Natural Resources, 10, 485-499.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., and R. A. Pielke, Sr., 1997: Hurricanes: Their Nature and Impacts on Society. John Wiley and Sons Press: London.